Jesus Christ vs. Donald Trump: To Count the Cost of Following

Here is your must read of the day. My friend Russell Moore, the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, has come out with a pretty strongly worded rebuke of Donald Trump. It’s one of those “I wish I’d written this” pieces.

In the 1990s, some of these social conservatives argued that “If Bill Clinton’s wife can’t trust him, neither can we.” If character matters, character matters. Today’s evangelicals should ask, “Whatever happened to our commitment to ‘traditional family values’?”

Mr. Trump tells us “nothing beats the Bible,” and once said to an audience that he knows how Billy Graham feels. He says of evangelicals: “I love them. They love me.” And yet, he regularly ridicules evangelicals, with almost as much glee as he does Hispanics. This goes beyond his trivialization of communion with his recent comments about “my little cracker” as a way to ask forgiveness. In recent years, he has suggested that evangelical missionaries not be treated in the United States for Ebola, since they chose to go overseas in the first place.

Still, the problem is not just Mr. Trump’s personal lack of a moral compass.…

Jesus taught his disciples to “count the cost” of following him. We should know, he said, where we’re going and what we’re leaving behind. We should also count the cost of following Donald Trump. To do so would mean that we’ve decided to join the other side of the culture war, that image and celebrity and money and power and social Darwinist “winning” trump the conservation of moral principles and a just society.

Campaign internal polling is often more accurate than public polling. The campaigns dedicate more resources and want the polls as accurate as possible. The campaigns that take shortcuts can wind up in a world of hurt. Media polls often do the same. They rely on pretty inaccurate online polls or they don’t call enough people or they form groups of voters to call based on databases, etc...